Before joining Keele in January 2015, I studied and worked at Loughborough University, where I obtained my doctorate in 2011. My PhD thesis focused on seventeenth-century women’s religious writings, particularly the life-writings and prophecies of Baptist women. This research was published by Ashgate Press in 2015, and was nominated for the Richard L. Greaves prize by the International John Bunyan Society in 2016. I am interested in all aspects of early-modern women’s writing, particularly the role of women in seventeenth-century dissenting communities, and the life and work of Aphra Behn. I would welcome PhD applications to work in any of these areas and seventeenth-century literature and culture more generally.

My research centres on women's textual participation in seventeenth-century dissenting communities, particularly the function of women's religious treatises, spiritual testimonies, and prophecies in early Baptist congregations. In 2011, I completed my AHRC-funded PhD on this topic and the revised version of this research was published by Ashgate Press: Baptist Women’s Writings in Revolutionary Culture, 1640-1680. Some of this research has also appeared in article form in The Seventeenth Century, Prose Studies, and Notes and Queries. My work on the Baptist, Deborah Huish, published in The Seventeenth Century, has also been the focus of a display at the Devon Heritage Centre, where original manuscript church records of Huish’s Baptist congregation were put on show alongside explanatory notes and images of her published writings. You can read some of my research on Huish’s congregation on the National Trust’s page for Loughwood Baptist Church, South Devon, where she worshipped.

I am also interested in seventeenth-century dissenting culture more generally and am currently researching a new project on 'Writing the Dissenting Community post-1660'. I have recently completed a chapter on 'Women and Dissent' for the Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Beginnings to 1689 (Oxford UP) and am developing an article on the significance of believers' baptism in dissenting communities. I am also involved in the Dissenting Experience project which aims to catalogue and encourage further study into to utilisation of seventeenth-century church books. Recently, I have also been elected to sit on the Executive Committee for the International John Bunyan Society as European Treasurer.

I remain committed to the recovery and exploration of early-modern women's writing. In 2014 I co-edited an anthology of seventeenth-century women's works concerned with exploring the relationship between spiritual and corporeal understandings of religious experience, and I am currently editing two of Aphra Behn's plays (The Roundheads and The Young King) for the new Cambridge University Press Complete Works.